Avatar is possibly the most beautiful CGI movie ever!

[Reasonable]

donathos said:

Khuutra said:

TheRealMafoo said:

Khuutra said:

World's changed and we're more educated, eh?

Can you tell me the last time we had some good, old-fashiond colonialism in its first stages?

(here is a hint: it wasn't 600 years ago)

When and what are you referring too?

I'm not really sure! I don't have a comprehensive knowledge of colonial history, because there's so much of it. Even if we ignore things like the second Sino-Japanese War or the Algerian War, there's still the Anglo-Zulu war which took place in the 1890's.

Colonialism is dying, but it's not dead. It's not going to be dead for a long time, and its current fall from its former position is a result of a concerted international effort to decolonialize on the part of all major nations in the wake of World War II. Remember Hong Kong? Wasn't released from British rule until 1997.

The thing about colonialism in a modern context is that there's international pressures, including human rights organizations and the more humanely minded major world powers, that keep colonial efforts in check - in theory, anyway. The world has become hostile to colonialism on a large scale (we don't tend to look at southeast Asia much anymore, though some of us are still pissed off about Tibet) because it results in the death of cultures and the suppression of human rights.

That's not going to be the case for a place like Pandora, which exists under no international treaties except those which govern all of space, has no standing under human rights charters, and is invisible to the majority of the public because we can't afford to bring more than a few thousand humans there ever (according to Cameron, the cost of taking something to Pandora is ~$1 million per pound). The setup created in this sci-fi universe is exactly like that which lead to exploitative colonization by the British Empire in Africe i the 19th and 20th centuries.

My point being here is that we're making a concerted effort to lessen colonization in the world today, but those efforts exist under current circumstances and may change in the future, and would not extend beyond the power base of the constituent nations who push for decolonization.

I guess I'm trying to say

I don't see a return to colonization as unrealistic

I completely agree.  It's not unrealistic.  And to speak to Reasonable's latest post, I don't think it's even a bad thing to present a colonialism analogy.

If we're looking at Avatar alone, in a vacuum, I think I have no problems.  It's just that it seems to me that this is *almost always* how it's presented.  Maybe I'm wrong?  Maybe I'm remembering selectively?  But it feels like "the guy in the suit" is always the villain; that business tactics in the movies always amount to foreclosing on an elderly widow.

And, because Avatar *is* so... metaphorical, and widely applicable, it seems to be saying not just that this one business is operating this way, but that Business Operates This Way--by uprooting people's Hometrees to get at unobtainium.

Do some businessmen operate this way, even today?  Absolutely.  And it has a place in art, and maybe Avatar is that place.  It's just a theme that seems highly familiar to me by this point, and I don't see much science fiction stepping up to the plate to show how business *ought* to operate in these kinds of scenarios.  No heroes who show how unobtainium might be obtained w/o horrific consequences, just the moral that unobtainium is best left unobtained, and to want to do otherwise is to be the villain.

But again, maybe I'm overstating the case?  Maybe the fiction examples I'm looking for exist, and I'm just blocking them from memory?  I dunno.

Oh, i don't think annalogy is bad, just in this case dissappointing and a little boring.  It's very rare that a director gets the money & freedom Cameron had with regards to a Science Fiction movie, and I was just dissapointed he used it to tell me something I already know very well and infact have seen many times before, and truth be told better told before.

I would have greatly preferred him to take a risk and actually use something more interesting from the SF ouvre for his story, not something as often told as the story he chose.

The following paragraph is from a review of Avatar in UK, referring specifically to Cameron, and I think it nails him perfectly (I would in that it matches my own view of Cameron having seen all his movies and read many interviews and analysis of him) as well as highlighting the flaws this meant for Avatar as a film when compared to other films and not taken in a vacuum.

Quote

Cameron is an old-fashioned story-teller, a dealer in myth and archetype, a creator of worlds and none too happy grappling with the complex realities of modern life as he demonstrated in True Lies and Titanic. Avatar, which has been on his mind for 15 years, is the perfect expression of his gifts and vision and depends upon forms of computer technology and 3D photography he's been developing ever since Titanic and experimenting with on documentary movies.

Avatar is overlong, dramatically two-dimensional, smug and simplistic. It preaches a sermon about our duty towards the preservation of the environment while leaving the biggest trail of carbon footprints since Godzilla trampled New York. But the imagery is often breathtaking, the ferocious battles brilliantly staged and technically it pushes the medium forward.

End Quote

Together with the lack of imagination chosen for his theme and story, that's my main issue with Avatar (as well as some other Cameron films) - he is good on story, on a mythic sense of big events, and he is a good director, but his sense of detailed, rich characters is weak, and his writing is by far his weakest area, something all to apparent in Avatar.

My dream would be to see a Cameron film that had Cameron credited as Director and for Story, and someone else for screenplay.

Ripley aside in Aliens, a character who was handed to him ready made by Ridley Scott and Sigourney Weaver, Camerson has often struggled to create truly interesting, memorable characters with depth.  He's great and creating Hudson's and the like but struggles beyond fun supporting characters or obvious sterotypes for his main characters.

Avatar is a good film, no doubt about it, but it's technical achievements and Cameron's usual gift for kinetic scenes aside, it is terribly pedestrian in all other aspects.